


Past The Parcel

by Britpacker



Series: Dating Games [2]
Category: Star Trek: Enterprise
Genre: Early Days, M/M, Secret Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-10
Updated: 2017-01-10
Packaged: 2018-09-16 16:06:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9279254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Britpacker/pseuds/Britpacker
Summary: Trip’s maundering.  When did that uptight annoying Armoury Officer become a friend? Come to that, when did that brash, obnoxious loudmouth of an engineer develop qualities beyond the prettiness of his packaging...





	

**Author's Note:**

> Set a few weeks after the boys get together, sometime during Season 2.

“Did I mention the Cap’n’s hintin’ about water polo again?”

Malcolm Reed’s hands froze midway through the intricate process of reinitialising the torpedo launch sequencers, intent grey gaze turned quicksilver as he checked out their immediate vicinity. “It’s okay – Eddie and Seb are still on break,” Trip Tucker assured his lover, wincing a little when the man resumed his delicate task without a downward glance. “You sure you’ve got that right, Mal? Stopping halfway through a job like this is risky…”

“It’s fine.” No name, but no use of rank either. Tucker took that as a hopeful sign and hopped up to sit on the weapon, lean and menacing even while disarmed on its narrow platform. Not, he mused, so different from the man who controlled it. “Oi, feet off the bed, please! If there’s any contaminant on the platform when we try to fire, it can throw our aim by as much as point two microns. So, you’re going to admire brawny young men splashing around in their smalls, are you?”

“You know the only ass ah wanna be admirin’s yours, Mal.” The Southerner’s patented _dumb hick_ tone reverberated in the steely silence and the dark-haired lieutenant laughed, keying in the last digit with a flourish before slamming the panel shut and climbing up to perch beside him, feet dangling safely beyond the platform’s edge. “I blew him off last week. I do it again, he’ll start askin’ questions and you know I can’t lie to Johnny.”

“Or to anyone else.” Temptation overwhelmed him and Malcolm sighed, letting his head fall onto his boyfriend’s broad shoulder while Trip’s arm snaked around his waist. “We’ve both got our own interests, and frankly I don’t fancy having to answer Travis’s Twenty Questions if I duck out of chess again tomorrow! He teased me about running scared last time until I dropped a small hint about live fire practice...”

“You wouldn’t!” Tucker shot upright so fast the smaller man almost lost balance. Reed flashed an unrepentant grin. 

“Of course not, but it did the job,” he said sedately, patting the missile. With a show of reluctance Trip climbed back aboard and re-linked both arms around his waist. “All I’m saying is – I don’t want to monopolise you. We _are_ allowed other friends.”

“They’re not as much fun as you.”

“If I thought you were having our kind of fun with the captain, there’d be trouble.” Lithe as a gymnast Malcolm twisted to plant a peck on his chin. Trip snickered.

“We’ll be done by twenty-one hundred.” he hinted.

“I _should_ still be awake.”

“And you’ll come by my quarters when you’ve whipped the boomer’s butt tomorrow?”

“If I can keep my mind on the game. You play hell with my concentration sometimes.”

“’s mutual, darlin’.” Tightening his hold Trip dropped his chin onto the brunet’s crown, the laughter swelling up from his gullet stopped short by a sudden, shocking realisation. “You know something? If anyone’d said to me when we shipped out of spacedock: _Trip, one day you’re gonna find yourself sitting on a torpedo cuddlin’ that snitty sarcastic tightass of an Armoury Officer_ , I’d have called in the psych assessors. Can you believe we’re so good together, Malcolm? You and me?”

“If anyone had suggested I’d be letting that brash obnoxious halfwit of a Chief Engineer anywhere _near_ my weapons I’d have been tempted to detonate one.” Nobody had ever kept him off balance like this mercurial English stoic: where Trip worried he might be offended, Malcolm laughed hard enough to bust a blood vessel. “Honestly, Trip! All I got from you was _aww, keep yer shirt on, Lew-tennant_ every time I tried to suggest my missing supplies might actually be quite important…”

“You’re quite a sight when you’re all wound up.” Reed’s soft snort made his whole body quiver. “It’s true! If you’d been a girl I would’ve said: damn! That Armoury Officer’s a pain in the ass, but boy is she hot!”

“Just as well I’m not, then.”

“Oh, you’re definitely _hot_ , Mister Reed.” The prospect was too horrible to contemplate but now it was in his head Trip couldn’t stop himself. “I’d have looked at the gorgeous package and never seen the person, and it was only when I got to know you that I… fell in love. With the person.”

Malcolm cocked his head. Narrowed his eyes. In spite of himself Tucker felt his heart start to sink a little at that ever-so-familiar focussed look. “Don’t take this the wrong way, love, but in the early days I think I’d have said the attractive packaging was the only thing I liked about you!”

Trip pushed him to arms’ length and frowned. “You wanna tell me the right way to take that?” he asked plaintively. Malcolm tweaked his nose.

“That I fancied you from the outset despite your inexcusable lack of interest in my departmental shortages?” he suggested. Trip’s brilliant smile glinted off the myriad reflective surfaces of his domain until it threatened to dazzle him. “It was a relief, actually, when I realised I liked you as a man. Saved me the trouble of finding reasons why I shouldn’t simply regard you as some kind of guilty sexual fantasy.”

Full, flexible lips pursed and Malcolm applied a mental boot to his own rear end as he contemplated the enormity of what he’d just revealed. “I think I like the idea of bein’ your _guilty sexual fantasy_ ,” Trip wheedled, catching his chin to guide him upward when every instinct told the Englishman to look away. “But that’s what I mean. Once we got to be friends I stopped noticing how good you look; just started thinkin’: hey, there’s my buddy Malcolm! I got to _know_ you, and then when I realised I’d fallen in love it was with everything. Body and soul, jus’ the way I always wanted to love someone. Maybe it should’ve freaked me out, you bein’ a guy an’ all but it just - made sense.”

With a solemn nod the brunet allowed his partner’s guileless admission to pass, for the time being at least, as curiosity took a grip. “When did you start thinking of me as a friend?” he asked. Trip sighed, absently brushing a wayward sable curl from the Brit’s broad brow.

“Remember when I saw those non-existent rock aliens?”

“And decided T’Pol was in some kind of villainous alliance with them. I’m not likely to forget it!”

“I felt like everyone else was laughin’ at me the whole week after.” Malcolm’s hair felt good against his fingers; silken-soft, a pleasant distraction from the hot crawl of humiliation, like a hundred burning spiders climbing out of his belly. “You – you didn’t even flinch. Treated me just the same as always, and I remember thinking – he’s a good guy, Malcolm Reed. I like him.”

“I’m sure you’re exaggerating, but can you imagine what would’ve happened if I’d been there, with my allergies?” Malcolm unleashed a crooked grin that flipped Trip’s heart over. “Combine my professionally itchy trigger finger with them _and_ hallucinogenic pollen ... it was after your mishap that I started checking in with Phlox for anti-allergens before every away mission. I should be thanking you, really.”

“Glad t’ be of service ah’m sure!”

Reed had the audacity to smirk. “Oh, you are, Commander,” he purred, shooting a quick glance toward the door as booted footsteps clanged beyond. “But we’ll save that for a more appropriate time and place, shall we?”

“Then I got myself pregnant and nobody believed me when I said I’d done nothin’. Nobody except you.”

“I didn’t understand that – not the Captain’s reaction,” Reed amended hastily. “Obviously Vulcan logic wouldn’t allow for the idea of your being, erm _, inadvertently_ impregnated, but surely Archer knows you’re honest to a fault? If you’d got your leg over on the Xyrillian ship, you’d have said so. You denied it: therefore, you hadn’t. It took me a while to forgive the captain his attitude.”

“What attitude?” He’d not expected many people to believe his protests but Jon’s scepticism had cut deep. Malcolm shrugged.

“Imagine if Hoshi had come back in the club – sorry, that’s an English-ism. Imagine she’d protested her innocence. Would he have given her all that holier-than-thou, _deeply disappointed_ shit that you had to take? Or would he have been chasing the Xyrillians all over the quadrant screaming rape? You were taken advantage of to put it very mildly, Mister Tucker. As far as I’m concerned you _were_ raped, and you so-called best friend’s reaction was to look down his nose and imply you’d been asking for it.”

“Easy, darlin’.” More than a year on he was still getting all fired up about it, and while a fired-up Reed was a mighty fine sight Trip hated to see his man hurting. “She didn’t realise it could happen – hell, we’re all lonely out here sometimes.”

“Does that give us the right to violate strangers on a whim? We don’t understand the physiologies of the species we meet: we can’t simply assume they all procreate like humans. The Captain should have given his Chief Engineer – his friend – the benefit of the doubt, and he didn’t. The crew took their lead from him and sniggered behind their hands. He should’ve been bloody ashamed of himself for doubting you but all he was worried about was how it’d all look to the Vulcan High Command!”

“You’re bein’ a bit hard on the cap’n.”

A fine dark brow twitched. “And you’re too forgiving. I – I wanted to let you know not everybody was judging you, Trip. That if you said you were innocent, I believed it.”

“It meant a lot that somebody wasn’t treatin’ me like some kind of liability out here.” Not that he hadn’t felt like one, but Tucker knew better than to put himself down before his most vociferous ally. Malcolm snorted.

“You’d proven your worth a dozen times by then, and everybody makes the odd mistake. I’m the one got winged by a hundred-year-old percussion bullet underground on a polluted planet, remember? Some security officer I am!”

“Anyone can get caught by a lucky shot.” Deep down, unacknowledged for months after, Trip knew that had been the day he’d first shied away from his feelings for the handsome English officer. “I was scared for you, Mal,” he added unconsciously seeking Malcolm’s hand to fold into his own. “When the cap’n told us you were hurt and being kept as a hostage I remember thinking... _why him?_ ”

“It wasn’t so bad: I’ve stayed in worse hotels. They weren’t terribly communicative but I never felt threatened; and I’ve never been fazed by Chef’s god-awful meatloaf since. Digger meat,” he added by way of explanation. “I’d swear the poor animal was still bleating as I chewed it.”

“Gross.” A common distaste for rare steak had formed an early connection over dinner, turning two experienced officers into truculent teens to the amusement of an entire senior staff around the captain’s table. “That when you started stashin’ spare protein packs in the shuttlepods?”

“One can never be too careful.” It hadn’t taken Phlox long to repair the damage done by an antiquated projectile weapon but Reed still cringed to remember how he’d hobbled back from E to B Deck under the eyes of what felt like half of Starfleet. “And if the captain can hide his best bourbon there… do we still owe him for that?”

“Most likely.” As if an icy wind had blown through the ship Trip shuddered, pulling his companion a little tighter. “So what about you, Mal? When did you get past the pretty packaging and learn to love your loud-mouthed obnoxious engineer?”

He shouldn’t have been surprised that the armoury officer sat a little straighter, head cocked as he considered the light-hearted question with unwarranted seriousness. “Around the same time, I suppose,” Malcolm said slowly. “You were awfully kind to me, dashing over to get tea from the dispenser when I limped into the observation lounge on a gammy leg. Then when the Vulcans helped drag Travis and I back from an icy tomb you were the first person to actually ask if _I_ was all right…”

“Everybody else was flappin’ around Travis so hard their feathers were flyin’ off and there you were all on your own, checking the pod for damage.” It had twisted Tucker’s heart so hard it hurt. Malcolm nodded.

“He needed the attention: he was the one injured. But it was nice to know somebody was concerned about me.” A tiny gesture of wordless support when he’d been grinding his teeth in pain; the obvious, vocalised concern after a mission gone nerve-shakingly wrong. It was, Malcolm considered, no wonder he’d been drawn to the open, outspoken Southerner, a man diametrically opposed in so many ways to himself. “I’m not really used to people showing an interest in my welfare, you know. I was shocked how much your kindness _mattered_.”

“You’re not the man to show it but anyone’d be pretty shook up nearly bein’ frozen inside a comet. I figured out that day we’re the same, you and me.”

“Are we?” 

Genuine puzzlement, obtuseness all wrapped up in the most observant sonofagun ever to wear Starfleet uniform. Trip loved him all the more for it.

“The way we react to stress, yes. C’mon, Malcolm! I walked into the launch bay and while everybody else was in a panic you were just quietly unpackin’ your kit and checkin’ the pod for damage. I’ve used routine often enough to hold off shock. I know when someone else is doin' it, even if it’s the guy everybody thinks is immune t’ that kind of thing.”

“You’re sharper than you look, aren’t you?” Joking to avoid emotional scenes: another shared tic neither man usually admitted Tucker thought, startled by his sudden burst of candour. “Then you accepted my recommendation – albeit reluctantly – for drawing power straight from the impulse engines for the cannons. That said you respected me more than any of the rows we’d had about point one of a micron here or there and I thought – yes. I like him after all.”

“Ah’m glad t’ hear it, loo-tenant.” Drawing his accent out to the lengths Hoshi said would test the UT to its limits Trip leaned back to grin guilelessly at his lover, already tensing his arm for the inevitable exasperated cuff. “That mean if I let you ravish me tonight you promise t’ still respect me in the mornin’?”

“Always, love.” The distorted voices of his subordinates returning from break rang weirdly in the corridor outside and with a long-suffering sigh Reed dismounted his perch, turning his attention back to the platform’s release panel. “And thank you for your help, Commander,” he added more loudly, confident even that oblivious bonehead would get the hint. “I believe the issue’s resolved now.”

“Nice job, Lieutenant.” With his back turned he couldn’t see the fond smile gracing Tucker’s level features but the engineer had no doubt it was audible to so sharp an ear. “Catch y’ later, buddy.”

He’d been the one unsure about the whole secrecy thing, deferring to his boyfriend’s dislike of _drawing attention_ for the sake of a peaceful life but as he sauntered by the unsuspecting armoury crewmen at the door, Trip Tucker made an alarming discovery.

Having a secret, especially one all wrapped up in the perfect parcel that was Lieutenant Malcolm Reed, was fun.


End file.
